Editor's note: As temperatures dip to record lows, we take a look back at this story that was originally published in 2016, so some references may be out of date.

What is it about kids of a certain age and the aversion to wearing a coat when the wind chill factor hovers near zero degrees?

The kid walking in a small pack from West Lafayette High School — sweatshirt, no coat, no hat — was a likely suspect to explain. He didn’t show signs that the 9-degree temperatures (feels like 1 degree, according to the National Weather Service) were cutting into his hike to lunch Tuesday. His sleeves were long, but pushed up to just below his elbow. His hands were in his pockets, but other than that, he was surviving on a day when state emergency planners are encouraging people to keep a trickle of water running overnight in the kitchen to keep pipes from freezing.

What’s the secret?

“Nuh-uh,” the kid smiled and shrugged, before ducking into a sandwich shop across from Purdue University’s Mackey Arena. “My mom would kill me.”

You know she would. But that wouldn’t change a cold, universal truth that has had moms wanting to shake some sense into sons and daughters for eons.

“This has been going on forever. At some point, they get cold enough,” said Judith Myers-Walls, a Purdue professor emerita of human development and family studies.

Until then? “A lot of parents of high schoolers simply throw their hands in the air,” Myers-Walls said. “Parents know they have to pick their battles.”

The question is: At what point does that receptor in the brain — the one that equates freezing temperatures with the need for adequate clothing — click off and then click back on?

As an assistant principal at Sunnyside Middle School, Matt Brown has put in plenty of bus loading and off-loading duty. For the most part, the fifth- and sixth-graders he sees have reached that point. His time spent previously at Tecumseh Junior High School, where Lafayette’s seventh- and eight-graders go, offered a dividing line.

“Fortunately at our level, for a good majority of our students, there's someone telling them to put their coats and hats on in the morning,” Brown said. “But there's usually a small number of kids that want to show Mother Nature that they're not afraid of her, but if you look closer, they've got that coat stuffed in their backpack. … By the time they are in junior high, they’re ready, or at least think they are, for making that decision.”

You know the story is just starting at that point.

Last week, Purdue President Mitch Daniels posted a stocking-capped selfie on Twitter showing him holding up mittens that had “Boiler” on one hand, “Up” on the other: “3 degrees tonight. Take the necessary equipment!”

Daniels later said the post was meant to be a shout out to the person who made the mittens for him. But was it also a subtle, in loco parentis hint to 40,000 students wandering campus in frigid conditions?

“You’re on to something there,” Daniels said. “I stop our students all the time. I’m all bundled up, and I’m frozen. And there’ll be some guy running around in shorts and sometimes a T-shirt. I just don’t get it. One, how can you stand it? Secondly, why would you? But you know, I have to hand it to a lot of our students — they’re just impervious. Tougher than I am.”

Myers-Walls said there’s no research she knows of that covers — or is that uncovers? — the question of kids and coats. But she said she had a few theories, given the perpetual nature of the anecdotal evidence presented, one winter after another.

She broke it down into five issues that contribute.

• Kids these days: “The realities of today,” Myers-Walls said, “are that kids aren’t walking uphill 2 miles, both ways, to school anymore.” Her point: With kids getting rides to school, often having to brave only the garage and a short walk to the school entrance, they can find reasonable excuses to leave a coat behind. That doesn’t explain the refusal of kids who have to walk to school or have to stand at a bus stop. Myers-Walls said the hope there is that “natural consequences” — “Hey, it’s cold, I should wear a coat” — kick in before frostbite or hypothermia do.

• Hassle: Small lockers mean a tight squeeze. “Some kids think it’s just not worth it,” Myers-Walls said. (The same theory holds for Purdue students heading to the bars in the West Lafayette Village on any given, frigid night, thinking about having to hold a coat all night.)

• Higher metabolism: Kids’ systems are ramped up and are able to handle the cold better than when they get older.

• Bravado: “Being cool is the biggest thing,” Myers-Walls said. They can handle it all, and they’re going to show it — to their parents, to their friends and anyone else.

• Living for the moment: “Kids don’t think in terms of ‘what if,’” Myers-Walls said. “So it’s, ‘I’ve made it this long without a coat. What could go wrong?’”

The upshot? “Ultimately, this is about being in control of something,” Myers-Walls said.

That includes eventually bundling up when necessary.

A walking tour of Purdue’s West Lafayette campus Tuesday morning offered some hope on that front, where the shorts and T-shirts Daniels said he encounters periodically weren’t on display to and from classes.

“Warm enough?” I asked Emma Finley, a Purdue junior, as she walked through the Village with a coat unzipped and minus a hat on her head. She said she was fine — “Cold, of course,” she said — as we compared notes on layering. (For the record: I had five layers on, from T-shirt to coat. I’m a layering fan, going way back.)

And we compared notes on kids and coats, and when she turned that particular corner.

“I was like that, I guess. ‘A coat — what a hassle,’” Finley said. “We’ve all been there. We all get over it.”

She hunched her shoulders so her collar blocked the wind from her uncovered ears.